It was her dad’s lingering nightmare. But for Shivani Darsinos, owner of Nashville’s Cafe Babu, opening a food and beverage business was a dream, sparked and nurtured since childhood.
It started, as many dreams and nightmares do, in Las Vegas.
“We had this adorable little father-daughter bonding moment,” Darsinos remembers, dipping into the late-afternoon din inside her busy Chestnut Hill cafe. “I was like 12 years old, and we went to a Starbucks together. At the time, this is before independent coffee shops were really becoming a thing… I remember I just felt so grown up. I was just astounded by coffee culture.”
The burr of grinding beans pierced by a whinny of steam, spectacled creatives curled around laptops, giddy friends giggling over lattes. The now-classic coffee-shop buzz and bustle felt new, exotic, and enticing. But the hospitality industry itself was familiar.
Darsinos grew up folding guest towels in her family’s hotels, the management of which took them from Atlanta to Illinois and then, when Darsinos was 6, to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where she spent most of her childhood. Before the hotels, dad Prakash Patel began his entrepreneurial story with a sandwich shop, Roma Subs. Going by how emphatically he exited, it was not a fit.
“He was like, ‘This is miserable. I’ll never do a food and beverage (business) ever again,’ kind of thing,” Darsinos remembers. “So even before I was opening up this cafe, he was like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Now he’s like, ‘Alright, how many more Cafe Babus can we open?'”
A seasoned hotelier knows a retention rate when he sees one. Opened in late 2024, Cafe Babu has become an all-day oasis in what was an under-trafficked part of Nashville, before Wedgewood-Houston’s glow-up made everything around it boom. Now, in Babu, neighbors and Nashville visitors stop in for coffee and chai, wine and curry wraps, poetry, dancing, and DJ sets, depending on the time and day.
“From the beginning, I knew I wanted to open up a space where you have everything — coffee, cocktails, wine,” Darsinos says. “Like in Mumbai for instance, all the coffee shops, they’re gonna have a nighttime piece. It’s fun, being able to have that space where your go-to coffee shop also turns into a nighttime bar.”
Coffee and Calculations
Darsinos’ all-day cafe vision was consistent, but her path doesn’t seem so direct, at least from the outside.
She finished school in Bowling Green and went off to college at Lexington’s University of Kentucky, where “coffee shop” was not yet a major.
“I think everybody was hoping I would grow out of it,” Darsinos says, laughing. “My parents were like, ‘OK, we can’t study coffee, so what are you gonna do?’ … ‘What about chemistry? What about biology?’ But I’m not a science kid. (My dad) goes, ‘What about accounting? You’re really good at it.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, actually, that’d be awesome. And it can help in the future probably.'”
It helped, for sure. Accounting and finance degree in hand, Darsinos moved to Nashville in 2018 for an internship with tax service firm Ryan. She found a groove in managing the numbers — “My love for Excel sheets is like honestly unreal,” she says, “a girl should not love her pivot tables as much as I do” — but Darsinos made her non-negotiable dream clear from the get-go.
“I told them, ‘Hear me out,'” she says. “‘I wanna do this for now, but after five years I’m probably gonna leave and start a coffee shop.’ I was like, either they’re gonna love my boldness or they’re gonna hate my boldness. Either way we’ll figure it out.”
Figuring it Out
Five years into her finance career, as planned, Darsinos figured it out. Coming through in the cafe-creation clutch was another important man in her life: then-fiancé/now-husband Alexandros Darsinos, an architect and cofounder of Nashville’s Studio YUDA.
Alex flew a big, bold “chase your dreams” flag almost immediately, asking for deep details about her wildest wishes on one of their first dates together.
“He pulls out a napkin and I’m pulling out a napkin,” Shivani remembers. “We’re handwriting napkin notes, and he’s like, ‘OK, what would it take for you to do this?'”
Ultimately, it took an introduction and a heap of help.
Alex connected Shivani to the landlord managing 1044 3rd Avenue South, a “random, little space that wasn’t even intended to be used for anything,” she says. It was small and undeveloped, a blank slate brimming with potential.
“I’m like, ‘Well, I’m just gonna pour everything I have into this, and we’ll just DIY the whole place ’cause I can’t afford to hire anybody to do it. It was a lot of labor of love.”
If her hire-out budget was limited, her stash of human resources was ample. Alex — “very much a DIY person,” according to his wife — jumped in to lead the build-out, and both recruited troops from their respective and supportive families.
Shivani’s vision, fortuitously, aligned with Alex’s creative philosophy.
“There are two ways to approach architecture, I feel personally,” he says. “One is the architect is the person who designs and controls everything. And you have everything very rigid and everything contrived, prior to even beginning a project. Another way is to let it be more … organically created, or found. And a lot of my architecture is kind of more in that realm, the organic aspect.”
Comforts of Home
In Shivani’s dream, the day-to-night, coffee culture-inspired cafe would feel lived in, loved on, both multicultural and cross-cultural — organic and natural with a feeling of home that connects and comforts, no matter where or how you were raised.
“We come from a world where it’s like, modern, cool coffee shops,” she says. “But for me, I feel nervous to even put my cup of coffee down ’cause I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m gonna stain it.’ Alex and I have a really big fascination with raw, natural materials and letting things be worn.”
The finished Babu space bears out that vision.
Rugged, textured wall treatments evoke a walk through a Moroccan souk. Soft textiles draping overhead pay homage to (and flew in from) India. Tables seem to grow up out of rocks, formed to hold unfussy earthen tableware, custom-made in Mexico City. Even the deckle-edge menus support the vibe that carries from the patio to the bar, all earth tones and easy angles, nothing sharp, nothing spit-shined, everything warm and welcoming.
“At the beginning, we got reviews and people were like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m gonna go to Babu and sit on a rock,” Shivani says, laughing. “We’re like, yeah, we literally picked the flattest rock out of the stone yard so you can sit on a rock and feel grounded. Maybe this is a little bit of my hippy side, but it’s like, feeling a little bit closer to earth and to nature.”
The cafe keeps Shivani’s roots close, too. Colloquially, “babu” can be a term of endearment for a loved one, or a respectful way to address a gentleman. But specifically, it’s Shivani’s grandfather’s name. He passed away about a year before the cafe opened, and he was a heavy influence, encouraging her to help neighbors, reminding her that nobody’s a stranger.
During one of their many family work “parties,” Shivani’s sisters-in-law, Melanie Lopez and Amber Mitchell, went ahead and sculpted “Babu” into the wall.
“It was something so beautiful, because I was still contemplating,” Shivani remembers. “I’m like, ‘I really wanna name it after my grandpa, but I feel like people might think it’s kind of weird.’ I think everyone saw the excitement in my eyes, so they just concreted it in. ‘You’re gonna name it Babu. You have to.'”
More Napkin Dreams
Babu took the couple’s attention for a significant stretch. But 2026 is the “year of Alex,” Shivani says. He had his napkin dreams too, and with Babu humming, they’re moving forward.
In the summer of 2026, the Darsinos aim to unveil two new Nashville brands: Bar Ena, a cocktail hang with global speakeasy vibes, named after the village Shivani’s family hails from; and boutique fashion house/clothing store Leo Vas, full of pieces designed and curated by Alex. Both will be housed in a space across the street from Babu.
“It’s upscale casual, like day-to-night transitional wear,” Shivani says of Alex’s designs. “Like you can wear it to a coffee shop, you can wear it out.”
Leo Vas is Alex’s thing, and since it’s specialized, he doesn’t necessarily see it becoming an immediately lucrative thing. So the speakeasy is support — a way to bring income in regularly. Since she’s an established food and beverage entrepreneur now, Shivani will run it.
“I kind of snuck that one in there, but of course, being who she is, she’s taking it on as her own and is like 200% invested in the concept and the idea,” Alex says, beaming about his dream, his year, and his wife. “I would never, ever be able to accomplish what I’m doing without her.” NI
VISIT CAFE BABU
1044 3rd Ave. S.
Nashville, TN 37210
cafebabu.com | @cafebabu
